Motorola Droid — Ongoing Impressions
No question about it, Verizon’s ad campaign for the Droid has stoked public awareness of the new Android phone. I have been using it solid for a few days now and it is rare to run into someone who hasn’t heard about the Motorola Droid. Like the campaign that Sprint and Palm run for the Pre, it shows how mainstream smartphones are becoming.
Having used the Droid for a few days, let me share my ongoing impressions of the phone. First up, I get asked how I can use so many evaluation phones, while maintaining my sanity having four carrier phones of my own. That’s a fair question, and one with a simple answer. Google Voice is the magic that makes all this work for me. I forward all four of my own phone lines to the Google Voice number, and the GV number is forwarded to the phone I carry with me. Right now that phone is the Droid, so no matter which of my numbers gets a call, it rings on the Droid. Text messages to all four of my phones go right to the Droid through GV, too. And since the Android version of GV is so complete, I set the Droid to use GV for all outgoing calls. It just works.
So back to the Droid, what do I think so far? How does it compare to other phones I own or have evaluated? Would I recommend it for purchase? Patience, I’ll do my best to answer these questions and more.
I have been using the Droid exclusively for the past 4 days, and overall I like it. The size and weight are good for carrying it around in my pocket, and it feels good in the hand. I find the construction is very solid, even the slider has no extra play in operation. It offers a full experience for such a small device.
I am still impressed with the display, it is just beautiful to use for extended sessions. It is bright and vivid, and text is so crisp and easy to read. I find it is so resolute that I routinely use smaller fonts than I do with other phones, and that means more content on the screen at once. The touchscreen has a nice, light touch and is easy to work with.
Android 2.0 is a good evolution for the platform, and I have encountered no issues with phone operation. I am experienced with Android and that no doubt helps, as I find everything where I expect it to be. The widgets work as expected, and while some older widgets do not work on the higher resolution screen of the Droid, most I’ve tried work fine. Having used Android phones with both 5 and 7 home screens that can be customized, I find the three screens of default Android (as on the Droid) to be limiting.
Speaking of customization, that is done using those widgets on Android phones. There are many such widgets in the Android Market, which is good as the Droid ships with none. I found the Droid very plain jane out of the box, and Motorola/ Verizon would be wise to include some widgets for the phone. Widgets not only add functionality and convenience, but they can create the very look and feel of a phone. I am probably biased in this regard having used the HTC Hero for a bit, as the HTC Sense interface is just a bunch of widgets included on that phone. The Droid needs something to make the default home screen special, but all it has out of the box is a few app icons.
The Droid operation is very solid and performance is quite good. Everyone I have let play with the Droid has commented how fast everything happens, and that’s accurate. I find the hardware to be quite capable, even driving that high resolution display. I rarely experience any lags, and find I am able to concentrate on the task at hand rather than the phone itself. That’s the mark of a good device.
I find I rarely use the physical keyboard on the Droid. It’s not a great keyboard to start with, but frankly I find the onscreen keyboards (both portrait and landscape) to be pretty good. The only times I open up the keyboard in landscape mode is if the onscreen keyboard will take up too much of the screen. It does take up over half the screen, and while usually not a problem for short entries, sometimes I need to see the whole screen. The keyboard is useful to have if needed, and since it adds very little thickness or weight I’d rather have it available than not.
Last weekend I took the Droid to a monthly Geek Gathering, and everyone was very impressed with the phone. This was a tough crowd, too, as everyone was tech-savvy and very tuned into the smartphone scene. The performance of the Droid was mentioned repeatedly, and the fact it had a sliding keyboard while remaining so thin was a hot topic.
I have seen on the web numerous reviewers state that the Droid is the best Android phone to date. I largely agree with that assessment, but I temper that a little. If the carrier was not a factor and I was going to buy a phone today, I would buy the HTC Hero on Sprint. There are a few reasons for that choice that I’ll share.
I found the Hero to be just as good a performer as the Droid. While the display was not quite as big as that of the Droid, the Hero was a bit smaller making it a tad more portable. I’ve already stated that I don’t use the physical keyboard on the Droid that much, so the lack of one on the Hero didn’t bother me at all. HTC has included their own onscreen keyboards on the Hero, and they are better than the stock Android versions on the Droid.
The one thing (besides the carrier) that would have me choose the Droid over the Hero is Android 2.0. Specifically, it is the Google Maps Navigation that is included in Android 2.0. I have used the Google Navigation on the Droid and it is flat-out awesome. One 20-mile trip across town I made with the Droid as the navigator demonstrated to me how powerful it is. The ability to follow the route with the overhead satellite view is so useful I can’t state that emphatically enough. I have used navigation systems for years and this first attempt by Google already blows them all away. I would choose the Droid over the Hero for this reason alone, but it’s coming to the Hero soon.
HTC has already stated that it would be updating the Hero to Android 2.0 soon, and that is the clincher for me. Assuming that Google Maps Navigation will be in that upgrade, the Hero is the phone I would choose. HTC includes the Sense interface, a collection of home screen widgets which add a ton of utility while making the phone’s look and feel miles ahead of the Droid’s. Throw in the Hero’s physical phone buttons, and it’s my solid choice.
I still like my Palm Pre, don’t fret you Pre enthusiasts. But I find I can have more utility out of the box with apps already available in the Android Market, and I’m not alone in that regard.
James, why the Hero as opposed to the Eris? I have been playing with the Eris and it is a great little phone. Only issue I am having is that the battery life is a bit on the low end.
I was also wondering this. If the network is one of few reasons to like the Droid more than the Hero, why not choose the Eris over the Hero then? It’s the same phone but on a better network.
Hey James! I’ve been using Google Voice for a few months now, and I find it TOTALLY unusable. For some reason, Google Voice only rings my phones once, and only after the Google Voice voicemail bot has already picked up. So basically, it’s not forwarding my calls fast enough to be useful. I’m in the Houston area too (one day we’ll get to having that coffee!), so I was wondering if it’s just me. I’m using Sprint & AT&T phones, both do it.
What about the HTC Droid Eris? This is essentially the HTC Hero from Sprint AND it is on Verizon network!
I think the argument you are making is in line with what myself and others have been saying: The Droid Eris is better than the Moto Droid. This is of course a personal opinion based on who you are as a user, but I think if you’re looking for something with a more complete user experience… something that competes more directly with the iPhone… than look to the Droid Eris on Verizon. Mostly I would say because of HTC Sense UI.
Here is an article of interest:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9140544/Surprise_The_Droid_Eris_is_a_better_smartphone_than_the_Droid?taxonomyId=
This device will probably never make it here but I have some questions anyhow:
1 What’s the screen like outdoors in sunlight?
2 Are there any apps for writing notes on the screen? This is something I really miss with my non-touchscreen phone.
3 How good are the Office apps? Does it open password protected Word files, for instance?
4 How good is the camera for stills and video?
5 How is the volume through the speakers? I take that it does have stereo speakers?
Cheers
1. very hard to see
2. not that I’m aware of
3. I don’t have any pw protected Word files to test
4. good for both, but it’s very slow taking stills
5. loud
stumbled across this blog today and found your first reply inaccurate. screen is extremely visible in the sunlight. the resolution ad back-lighting are unmatched for i believe pretty much all touchscreen phones on the market right now. that combined with an offensively bright back light makes this phone totally usable in direct sunlight. the full version of documents to go app is a fully functional office suite that is superb to everything else i seen on a mobile, word, excel, pdf etc.. not sure if its available on other platforms but if it wasnt this app alone would be enough to keep me as a loyal android user. and further more the UI complaints I find pretty much unfounded. yes i agree the ui is bland but potential android users dont really seem to be embracing the idea of just how powerful an open source operating system can be. for instance i dont think any one is disagreeing that the hardware for the droid is awesome. and that the sole reason i bough the phone the hardware. so you wish it had a snazzier interface? if the past is any indication of things to come, htc will release android 2.0 with sense, someone like cyanogen over at XDA will hack it a week later and have a better more functional ROM then the the default 1 running on htc devices ready to be ported to any android phone you want. seriously.. you will need root access to switch roms on the fly which may be scary to some, but the process to rooting an android phone isnt nearly as scary as say the iphone. i got my g1 rooted it and had a custom jesus freke rom on it with full multitouch support and features not found on the regular android build all within my first hour of owning it, hell cyanogen was even doing his own OTA updates to support his roms everytime android had an official update!. this is the real beuty of open source people. u like the droids hardware but wish it had sense UI? so put it on there. its really that simple as soon as some 1 cooks up the rom. android is built on linux. real linux guys already know android in and out without ever even having used it. every was worried about the development community not wanting to learn android and start making apps for it. but no1 realizes google built this os around a preexisting development community thats not going away anytime soon. from what ive seen from my trials and tribulations with the trusty old g1, android is really a phone for me, I mean its mine, I make it do whatever I want!! right down the the freaking rom its running!! that level of control is not for everyone but its definately for me
It’s all good folks. Android FTW
It’s about time some other phone can finally stand up to that fruity Cupertino phone and spank Apple’s monkey.
Despite Verizon’s chest beating about “Droid Does” the one thing they skip over in all their ads is what Droid Doesn’t Do: multi-touch.
I can’t imagine going back to using an onscreen keyboard nor Google Maps without multi-touch. To use their own analogy, it would be like the Air Force taking delivery of a new stealth fighter only to discover the engineers designed it so the pilot had to lean out of the cockpit with a .45 and bang away at the enemy!
@Scotty:
Droid can and DOES multitask…just depends on the app and whether it incorporates that functionality.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5NJAMBzcts
I think we’ll see better implementation of gestures in Android, once Google re-codes their own native apps, accordingly.
For those asking, I haven’t played with the Droid Eris but it should be a great phone too. The price is certainly right. Both the Eris and the Hero have 3.2 inch screens so that’s good. The only “if” for me is that HTC has not said the Eris will get Android 2.0, and they have stated that the Hero will.
Earlier today, it was announced that Eris would be getting that update over the air possibly on December 11 (http://phandroid.com/2009/11/09/htc-droid-eris-ota-update-coming-too/).
But, Eris is literally the same phone as the Hero, except for a few aesthetic differences with the case… Just the Verizon version.
That doesn’t say Android 2.0, that just mentions an update to fix the pages of technical issues that is listed for the Eris. An update might be 2.0, but until Verizon/ HTC officially state it it might not happen.
I completely get the desire for HTC’s super slick Sense UI. However, as a former Hero owner who jumped to the Droid, I can confidently say that there is NO way I would go back to the Hero. Yes, the Hero’s notorious lag problems were fixed by the time the handset hit Sprint, but you will still feel the pain of that much less powerful processor compared to the snappiness of the Droid. And I just wouldn’t be able to give up the Droid’s amazing screen. It STILL blows me away every time I take out the phone.
The Hero had me frustrated in other areas, too. As someone who takes a lot of voice noted, I couldn’t believe how bad the recording quality was on the Hero. Video recording looked good on the Hero’s screen, but then if I recorded longer than two minutes, the recording started to show strange flickers and color shifts. And the battery! Holy god, I was consistently down to 50% by lunchtime with minimal use. (This may have been due to the apparent problem with the messaging app, but I returned the phone before finding out. No regrets.)
Yes, I miss some of HTC’s polish (the weather app, particularly on a rainy day, was the first thing I would show people on the phone) but Android 2.0 integrates Facebook into Contacts in a frankly more usable way (I love simply clicking a contact’s picture for that slick fly-out menu) and I find myself wanting for little more than graphical refinements from HTC. And to me, this is the clincher: I LOVE knowing that I don’t have to wait for HTC to make adjustments to their own UI before I’m allowed to get OS updates. I’m impatient like that!
So, in short, the reasons to stick with the Droid over the Hero:
Much more powerful processor
Much better screen
Much better battery life
Much better audio & video recording
No 3rd party developer standing in the way of OS updates
And on size? While the Hero was certainly lighter, I actually think it felt bigger in the hand.
Hope this helps your decision making process!
The Sprint Hero was just rooted too. I love my Hero except it just stopped receiving texts and VM notifications. Apparently there is some bug with bluetooth and some flag that tells the phone the rom is almost used up…then never resets it.
James,
Good write up. I took have been playing with Droid for a few days and agree with your thoughts.
I’m debating, like many, whether to swap it for the Eris, since I also don’t use the physical keyboard much.
Regarding Android 2.0 on Eris, I believe has been confirmed that it’s coming (could be wrong!). Not sure, though, it can do the turn-by-turn navigation.
Great to see Android coming on strong. For me, the Google integration (gmail, voice, calendar, etc.) is awesome.
I’d still choose Telenav over Google Nav. And if you want overhead satellite on the iPhone, MotionX does this with Microsoft/Bing-sourced satellite imagery. I agree it’s very cool.
I should add I’d choose Telenav over Google Nav when it’s free (Sprint plans). And the MotionX is an iPhone app. Too many handsets.
James,
How do you have it set up that your four phones are forwarding their texts to your Google Voice account?
Actually, only texts sent to the GV number get forwarded. I am giving that number to everyone for text messages. I thought phones with the calls forwarded to GV were forwarding texts too but it seems not when I just tested it.
I know that these might not be the most fashionable questions, but, I am anxious to know:
- How good is the radio in this phone? Does it have the same range, clarity, and sensitivity of past Motorola phones?
- How good is the web browsing experience?
Thanks!
Phone quality is superb, and good signal strength.
The web browsing experience is very good too.
I believe it was the day that Google Maps Navigation when Garmin’s stock dropped by a little over 16%. I was talking about this with a coworker….I pushed the “regression to a 12x multiple” standpoint, while he was leaning toward Google Maps Navigation as being a serious threat to the current GPS devices.
When I hear a ringing endorsement for Google’s app like the one here….it seems more likely that Garmin and Tom Tom’s market share are in danger.
Interesting to see a shakeup in the niche world of gps navigation systems.
James: I wonder if you have had any updated comments on voice call quality. I’ve noticed on the moto boards there are a ton of complaints about echoing audio, and I’ve had one person complain about noise when I call them (I don’t actually talk on the phone much, so I’m not a great example). I’ve left voice messages for myself to test, and I don’t get an echo, but I do clip sometimes, making some words hard to understand.
The reason I ask is that the more prominent reviews seem to have lauded the audio quality, while the real world feedback has been heavily mixed, with some people claiming a massive improvement over the iphone, others having people ask them to stop calling them from the droid because it sounds so bad or they cut out a lot.
There could be a lot of reasons involved in these complaints, but when I see trends like this, especially when the prime reviewers have no problems, but the early adopters do, I worry about QA issues in the final production units. (I’ve been bitten by that before, though usually with samsung devices)
I have seen those complaints too and have been listening closely for similar problems but I haven’t had any echoes or other quality issues so far. I have used the phone in calls quite a bit too.
Thanks, I’ll just keep an eye/ear on it for now I guess.
I played with a Moto Droid over dinner last night and wasn’t impressed. It doesn’t have the immediate usability of the iPhone. Give it to someone and they can’t figure out what button to push or how to find an app. Part of this is the iPhone’s one-button design, and part is the lack of a multi-touch swipe based user interface. The slide out keyboard is terrible, I’ve lived with the Palm Treo and Blackberry in the past, and I’ve used some phone’s with slide out keyboards and this one just didn’t work for me. The buttons didn’t feel good and I was more accurate typing on the on-screen keyboard. It also has some bugs, the camera auto focus didn’t work properly.
I definitely think that Android is getting better, and so far is eclipsing everything but the iPhone, but they aren’t just a year or two behind the iPhone in maturity, they have a very different design point, and its going to end up more like the Mac vs. other desktop OS’s. Apple limits what you can do to maintain purity of design, and wins in usability and the discoverability of features. Windows and Linux and Android let you customize everything, but are always going to be much harder to use.
What about the issue of no simultaneous voice and data on Verizon’s network?
My understanding is that Verizon’s CDMA network does not allow this while you can on ATT.
Um. So how does the phone work? You know, making and receiving calls, sound quality, voicemail ease, coverage, dropped calls, battery life? You do know it’s a phone, right?
Call quality is great as I’ve said before, voicemail is easy, I have not had a call dropped on Verizon in years on any phone, battery life easily lasts all day.
With my iPhone, call quality is great, voicemail is easy, I have not had a call dropped on ATT in years too (and no problem with battery life – unless I play too many games!)
I’ve been using the Droid now for a bit, and my only complaints are these:
1) No “phone/send” key on the front. I get that Google values search over everything else, but really? No key to pull up the phone app, when you have FOUR buttons on the front? (anyone find an app to re-configure these buttons yet?)
2) Keyboard — not enough definition between the keys, makes it harder to use.
3) Wake up — the only button that pulls the phone from sleep is on the top. I have pretty big hands, but this function makes it hard to wake the phone up with only one handed operation. (Or without maneuvering the phone in such a way that I feel like I might drop it.)
Other than that, I’m very pleased with the device, especially with GV as the dialer and text messaging app. Google Nav is really very well done, too.
I was showing a client phones from Verizon(Moto Droid, Eris, Storm) and trying to help him choose one and the biggest turn off for him on all three phone was the lack of zooming in the email app. I showed him my iPhone and he loved the pinch and zoom in the email. He has trouble with his sight so he needs to be able to zoom.